My opinion is rarely it is ok, although yes search engines have no problems with them.
There have been $xx,xxx mid sales & above of domains with hyphens. Poss. more.
Think online-gambling.de of all things went for about $37k recently!
Anyway, all i would say is i have about 1000 domains. Of them 5 are hyphenated, so that is my view. However imo my best domain is hyphenated! Got you guessing? It can work brilliantly.
Plus don't forget, in the same way you can enter a hyphen into a search engine or overture \& it doesn't recognise the hyphen, the same way we have no idea how often people type them into search engines in the first place, or whether lots of the public like them. New-york is a good example of it working. Still would be a great domain & i suspect a lot of the public would type this in anyway. It's not a brand , so millions would type in , it would not need promotion!
Just take your time & do your homework.
Pred
nb: would be really interested to see a list of past high, hyphenated domain sales. anyone got a list? :yo:
Found a thread for a few past sales......
http://www.dnjournal.com/archive/domainsales/2006/domainsales04_04_06.htm